Inspiring

Answered

My old contact form has stopped working

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
April 12, 2021
3 replies
860 views

Today I went back to an old site of mine that I had not touched for some time and I find the contact form is failing after submitting it:

  Application Error
     An error has occurred in the program
    close sendmail pipe failed, mailprog=[/usr/sbin/sendmail david@higgsy.com] at eval (11) line 108.

I think the way it works is the form Action is to reach out across the internet and run the FormMail.pl residing in the root of my domain. The error message above suggest to me there has been a fault whithin the formmail script when it tries to run sendmail

Am I on the right track here? My website is at

http://dave.higgsy.com/ and go to Contact

any suggestions as to what area I should investigate would be gratefully recieved, many thanks in advance

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer osgood_

If the form has suddenly stopped working after working when initially deployed/tested and you have made no recent updates to the code then that points to the server being updated without your knowledge and the script is no longer compatible. This should not happen without your prior knowledge but chances are its a shared server and updates happen 'behind your back'. Having said that FormMail.pl is a very old dated perl script for handling form submissions, it might be time to bite the bullet and update the way the information from the form is handled.

Gail5ECD

Known Participant

It is worth keeping an eye on php versions as some can be dropped by hosting companies as they are updated leaving the mail script unusable.

- "Good English is an Art."

higgsydAuthor

Inspiring

thanks GailSECD

they notify me when they are retireing old versions and also try to get me to pay if i need to still use an old version going forward so I'm all up to date on that front -

O

osgood_Correct answer

Legend

If the form has suddenly stopped working after working when initially deployed/tested and you have made no recent updates to the code then that points to the server being updated without your knowledge and the script is no longer compatible. This should not happen without your prior knowledge but chances are its a shared server and updates happen 'behind your back'. Having said that FormMail.pl is a very old dated perl script for handling form submissions, it might be time to bite the bullet and update the way the information from the form is handled.

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

Contact the hosting provider to find out which scripts they support. Some of the cheaper hosting plans don't support scripts to save on overhead.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

higgsydAuthor

Inspiring

many thanks to Nancy and Mr Osgood. I have begun to look at phpmailer so maybe stand by for questions!

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

I don't know anyone who still uses Perl programming (aka cgi-bin) for forms. If your server supports Perl, it very likely supports modern PHP code too which is what we use to collect & process form data in the 21st century. But writing secure scripts requires some coding skills. This PHP mail sending library is the one most web hosts recommend.

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

Alternatively, use a new contact form from a 3rd party service like Wufoo.com or JotForm.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

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